So-Called "Persecution Against Christians":

FaceBook offered this link at patheos.com: America Isn’t Growing Hostile Towards Christians, It’s Growing Hostile Towards Religious Bullies.. One excerpt from that page is:

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However, here’s the part that’s true: America isn’t growing hostile towards Christians— it is growing hostile towards religious bullies, and there’s a big difference between those two things.

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Few sane people give a hoot if one is a practicing Christian. There’s no movement to banish churches and put them under government regulation like in China. No one is stopping us from gathering together with other believers, from feeding the poor, or even from standing on the street corner with obnoxious banners that say turn or burn.

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Religious freedom and free speech is alive and well in America. These freedoms aren’t just tolerated, but embraced.

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What is not embraced, and what the majority of citizens (Christians citizens, mind you) are growing increasingly hostile towards, are fringe Christian extremists who are trying to institute their own version of sharia law that infringes on the rights and liberties of the rest of us.

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There’s a massive difference between freedom to practice one’s religion in a pluralistic society where we all equally have that right, versus enshrining one’s extremist religious views in laws that are imposed on the rest of us. There’s a big difference between saying that you want to be free and not forced to marry someone of the same sex, versus wanting to deny that right to someone else you don’t even know. There’s a big difference between wanting the freedom to own a business and conduct commerce freely in the public square, versus demanding to run a business that discriminates and infringes on the basic rights and dignities of everyone else.

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No one is trying to stop you from being a Christian. The country is not growing hostile towards Christians. It’s just growing hostile towards extremist, religious bullies, who are trying to hijack the nation and force everyone to live under their own set of morals and ethics.

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Growing hostile towards that kind of nonsense is not the same thing as growing hostile towards Christianity. It’s not even close.

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"True Christians" will undoubtedly bridle at this, but I tend to think of certain activities of fundamentalistist in terms of viral infections, epidemics even. That is influenced in part by Michael Crichton's resolution of the problem in his first well-known novel (his sixth novel actually), The Andromeda Strain. Here was this alien pathogen that could coagulate all the blood in the entire circulatory system in an instant (albeit more slowly outside of a narrow pH range), but since that virulence greatly reduces its ability to infect more hosts, the less virulent strains start to predominate.During the "Jesus Freak Movement" (which I lived through), fundamentalist Christianity was highly virulent. A major factor of that was End-Time Revelations and all that nonsense. After the mid-1970's I lost track of the local fundamentalist nonsense, having enlisted and been shipped elsewhere, but later I heard of a charlatan who wreaked havoc on the local major fundamentalist church, the center of the "Jesus Freak Movement" (ie, the massive influx of those members had propelled it into the Mega-Church category). That charlatan mispresented himself as a former Satanist who in the 1980's cause all kind of havoc. I will regard him much as the Mule in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, an anomaly who upset the natural evolution of things.Circa 1970, the new converts to Christian fundamentalism were mainly the burned-out hippies. They then engaged in very aggressive street proselytizing which drew in some number of new converts. We'll return to the overall consequences of those efforts.My high school best friend's mother and a few family members converted, so I became something of a "fellow traveller" (a McCarthyism term) as I observed that sub-culture while not actually becoming a member. Circa 1970, major emphasis was given to the End-Times and the Book of Revelations. This was the period when the infection was most virulent. Many new converts. Many new and very highly motivated proselytizers. The situation very quickly devolved to where you almost literally could not turn around without some religious nut preaching at you and trying to convert you.Ok, let's take that kind of religious community forward in time. The earliest Christians were convinced that the Second Coming was imminent, could happen any moment now. It is said that they wouldn't even bother to plant any trees, because nobody would ever be around to pick any of the resultant fruits. And yet the Second Coming did not happen and the resultant fruit of those trees planted nonetheless by non-believers was indeed eaten. The prophecies proved false ... and were immediately forgotten.Similarly, the Jesus Freak Movement expected the End Times to be immediately at hand. But as with that prior generation two millennia earlier, their families were still there and their children were still there and their grand-children were also still there. Despite all their religious beliefs, life still went on and their families still went on and their careers still went on.And over time, the virulence of Christian fundamentalism diminished, as with any virus.

No! That has nothing whatsoever to do with what I was saying!First, the virus analogy was just that, an analogy. And what I had observed about the fundamentalist community as a whole was that at first they were extremely virulent with so much constant hard-sell proselytizing that they have alienated most of the population from ever considering their religion and even predisposed most of the population to be hostile to them (hence the hostility towards religious bullies, which is what proselytizers tend to be). But then as time went by (remember, the End Times were at hand!) and the world continued on and they started having kids and jobs and mortgages and grandkids, etc, they settled down to having a life. So now the evangelical fervor is no longer there, though a lot of the hostility towards their earlier bullying is still there. Try to look objectively at what proselytizing is and does. Your target (or mark or patsy) has certain beliefs. Your goal is to get him to believe in what you believe. That means that you must destroy his prior beliefs in order to replace them with your beliefs. Could you possibly ever think up any human activity that could be more intrinsically offensive as to purposefully and with great planning aforethought attack someone else's religious beliefs with the explicit purpose to destroy them? OK, mass murder, torture, genocide do come to mind. So then proselytizing is only slightly less horrific than they are.So it's not just simply that nobody wants to hear what you believe, but rather they do not want you to directly attack their own beliefs with the intent of destroying those beliefs.Oh, but the evangelicals are "in their spiritual infancy." First, please do not call them that. Because "they" are not one single group. "They" are many different and separate religious groups who see almost as much difference between each other than they do with you "non-Christian" Catholics. I remember one telling quote of British philosopher and freethinker Bertrand Russell (from memory):

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When a Catholic becomes a Freethinker, he becomes an atheist. When a Protestant becomes a Freethinker, he simply forms a new religion.

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To a Catholic, if you disagree with official doctrine then you become a heretic, which is just as good as an atheist. But for a Protestant, if you disagree with official doctrine then you simply create your own doctrine and your own church -- that is, after all, the Protestant tradition. As ex-hyper-fundamentalist Ed Babinski depicted it in 1986: I have personally encountered individuals of these "fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative Christian" sects who object most vehemently to being labeled as one of those others. Even though we outsiders see them as the same thing, indistinguishable from the others, amongst themselves they draw extremely sharp distinctions between each other.So this isn't just one simple and simplistic group that we are talking about. Though, yes, there are some diagnostic similarities. And a bit of a history. Fundamentalism can trace its official roots back to the Niagara Conferences at the turn of the century (ie, around 1900). For a long time, they had segregated themselves into their own communities, having their own schools and their own Bible colleges, etc. Basically, they did all that they could to keep themselves separate from the rest of society. Another aspect of their subculture was a life-long study of Scripture (this will become very important).Their numbers were always small, but that was about to change. Across the street from my junior high school in Santa Ana was a Four-Square church. All any of us knew about it was "They believe really strange stuff!" Half a decade later, one of their members, Chuck Smith, split off and founded his own small church on the outskirts of Santa Ana and Costa Mesa (ironically in a region that half a century before that was known as "Gospel Swamp").Then the Jesus Freak Movement of circa 1970 hit in which hippies burned out on drugs instead became "hooked on Jesus" (a ubiquitous bumper sticker of the time). Overnight, the membership of these fundamentalist churches exploded.A member of this forum, I forget who, once explained what happened next with their theology. Now, originally you had to study Scripture all your life in order to understand it and there was a comprehensive study plan in place to support that. But now you had the vast majority of your congregation sitting there with no experience in studying Scripture. Empty vessels. How do you fill them? According to that forum member, that is when the life-long comprehensive study plan went flying out the window. Instead, the churches came up with sound-bites. The traditional Baptist view (many of these churches came from a Baptist tradition) was that they agreed to disagree because your life-long study informed what you believed. Now with these newcomers, the church had to dictate to them what they needed to believe, then cherry-pick passages to feed to them and instruct them into how to interpret those passages correctly -- even Faith has told us how you need to be properly instructed in how to interpret the Bible. Thus those churches became close-mindedly dogmatic. Yes, I would strongly agree that their theology is immature. They simply have not thought about it anywhere near enough. And they will fight you tooth-and-nail if you try to discuss it with them. What??? Their theology is immature. They want to make their immature theology the Law of the Land. An 8-year-old is immature. So we don't want to "put too much pressure on them and have them cave in" by not allowing him to drive an 18-wheeler cross-country? Or to have a regular driver's license?I'm sorry, but whatever are you thinking? What the hell are you talking about? What atheist would actually say that? I believe that this is the appropriate place for me to tell you, "Fuck you!", for saying something so absolutely idiotic.I have been an atheist for more than half a century now. My attitude about you theists is, even though I do not agree with your beliefs, you are free to believe whatever you want to. Furthermore, I will protect and defend your right to believe whatever you want to believe. In fact, I have done so through 35 years of honorable military service. IOW, in response to your statement, I respond with, "Fuck you! You have no idea what you are talking about!"Personal belief is one thing. Trying to get that personal belief instituted as a public law that will affect everybody, especially those who do not share that belief, well, that is an entirely different matter altogether. And that is especially the problem when dealing with "evangelicals". Uh, no. Not even close. We are dealing with adults. And with voting blocks. When you deal with a toddler, when he gets out of line you can simply pick him up and put him in his place. Exactly the same as with a misbehaving Chihuahua. You cannot do that with the "evangelical community." They are taking legal action against you and the rest of society, so you need to use legal action against them. That is so obvious, why didn't you ever realize it?